Posts Made By: Rod Kaufman

More than 27000 people on CNN's straw poll think the Apollo moon landing was a lie:
http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/space/07/17/moon.landing.hoax/index.html
The contagion continues to spread...

The good, they die young:
http://cnnwire.blogs.cnn.com/2009/09/13/israeli-pilot-son-of-columbia-astronaut-killed-in-crash/

Unmanned helicopters, friend vs foe identification on individuals, state of the art anti-tank missile defense systems:
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1254861903842&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
Point and click...

http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/living/2009/10/12/nr.morris.limbaugh.nfl.cnn
Rush said pro football is a fight between the bloods and the crips? Geez..

Anybody catch the History Channel's week long documentary on the second world war in color and in high definition?
It's a superb collection of documentary films, restored and some of it has never been seen before on TV. I like the way they shift back and forth between the war in Europe and the war in the Pacific. The sacrifices and 12000 or more American dead per month and the public consternation about it. A fascinating collection of films from the archives...

Well, not quite but still:
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-laser13-2010feb13,0,7891734.story

I took my wife's '09 Toyota Matrix into a dealership for an oil, filter and tire rotation along with the fix for the acceleration issue. Up till this point, the dealership had been filling the crankcase with 5-20 motor oil, as specified in the owner's manual. Now, I've found they changed the grade to 5-30 so I called the service adviser and he tells me Toyota changed the oil-grade requirement six months ago from 5-20 to 5-30 and apologized for "misinformation" being disseminated by Toyota regarding the oil requirements of their '09 models. I'm going to call the Toyota 800 number next week and ask for an explanation because this seems unusual to say the least.
My owner's manual calls for either a 0-20 or 5-20 grade and notes maximum fuel economy occurs with the 0-20 variety and states nothing about the 5-30 grade. Can using a 5-30 grade hurt my engine? Can using a 5-20 grade in an engine that requires 5-30 hurt the engine? I note many newer vehicles are designed to use 5-20 grades so I didn't think it was too unusual that my owner's manual specified it. I live in California and the climate is generally mild so I doubt whether the difference between the 5-20 and the 5-30 is critical but I don't really know.
Any thoughts about it?...

While I like the Toyota brand and I just had the acceleration issue fixed on one of my Toyotas, it's a bit disconcerting to read about the actions of one of its executives:
http://money.cnn.com/2010/02/21/autos/toyota_document/index.htm?hpt=T2
People have gotten killed but its evidently not the bottom line as far as Toyota is concerned...

While I had hoped Toyota had found a fix for sudden acceleration, an engineering professor demonstrated an apparent electronic defect inducing sudden acceleration in Toyotas, something Toyota denies. I watched the professor induce sudden acceleration on the national news but Toyota now refutes it:
http://money.cnn.com/2010/03/05/autos/gilbert_test_rebuttal/index.htm?hpt=C2
I hope Toyota is right and the fix on our '09 matrix is correct...

Just got better than it was:
http://www.sltrib.com/news/ci_14793508